Home

It started with a decision about home.

Somewhere in the middle of a long drive from a job interview in Kansas back to you in Illinois I was confronted by the reality that moving to a new home wouldn’t feel like home without you.  It was a startlingly happy realization.  I said no to the job…

…until you said yes the move…

…and we decided to call Kansas home together.

Our first house was small; a two bedroom box that could have nearly fit in the gigantic garage that came with it.  The kitchen had no drawers, the decades-old wall paper was discolored by cigarette smoke, and there was no key to the front door.  There wasn’t enough closet space in the bedroom to fit all our clothes, so I dressed each morning in the office.  In the kitchen there was a quaint built-in corner hutch, and next to it, a small clock in the kitchen under which we discovered an autographed picture of George W. Bush safely hiding from possible thieves or Democrats.

Our town was so remote that local television channels originated from towns over 90 minutes away, and for the first two years that we lived there we couldn’t even watch those channels because we lived in the 3% of the country to which DirecTV did not provide locals.  In fact, we had to watch the first half of our first Super Bowl together on a small television screen mounted in the corner of a terrible pizza joint in a town 20 minutes away, and then listen to the second half of the game on the radio.

There was no grocery store, no fine dining, no Target within a 90 minute drive.  We laughed when we arrived because we realized that we were about to find out how much we liked each other.  We were literally all we had.

I liked you.

In time we formed wonderful relationships and friendships, and that house and town became ours.  It was home.  Our home.

It was home because you were there.

And then we moved to Virginia, and spent hours toiling over where we would call home on this new adventure.  Oddly enough it was Doggie who helped settle it, and peanut butter pie, and once again your willingness to come with me.  Home became a two-story, four bedroom house that we couldn’t fill.  Our first meals in that house were at a small, bar-top table in our formal dining room because we’d never had space or need for a real table before.  There was a strange outlet near the ceiling above the kitchen door, birds lived under the eaves above our bedroom window, and there was so much yard to mow and trim that I still whine about it.

Our town was poor, and while we lived in one of the better sections of town, it wasn’t unusual to hear gunshots at night.  I would often come home from work, tired of talking to people all day on tours, to find you desperate to get out of the house and speak to anyone.  We had the left middle-of-nowhere Kansas, and somehow found ourselves more isolated than before.

But in the daylight we were surrounded by history – could jog around Civil War battlefields, have dessert in the building where Edgar Allen Poe spent his honeymoon, check out library books from a home once owned by a Confederate general, drive by three Civil War monuments on the way to the grocery store, and walk in the footsteps of Lincoln.  And our house had that amazing screened-in porch.  Our best days were on that porch.  And we decided that we would find out how much we liked each other because we had no one else.

I liked you.

It was home.  Our home.

It was home because you were there.

And then there was that summer trip to Norwalk; my home, the place I grew up never dreaming that I would find new homes in remotest Kansas, and down-trodden Virginia with a girl who could make those places – could make any place feel like home.  And as we walked around town, the place I had always called home, I remember thinking that home had changed – that you were home, and that would always be true.

So I asked you to marry me on my parent’s back porch, and I told you that you would always be my home.

I liked you.

There was a wedding in Virginia, but a new home was calling.  And so we came to Iowa, and it felt right.  So right in fact that we have built a new home, our home, together.

We brought the screened-in porch from Virginia to our new home, but replaced the autographed picture of a former President with our wedding photographs.  There’s no formal dining room, but our kitchen has drawers.  There are no Civil War earthworks to explore, nor monuments lining the avenue to Hy-Vee, but we can safely take a walk after dark, and our windows overlook a miniature forest of trees.  We have taken the best, and left the worst and it feels like home.

It started with my decision to stay with you, and your decision to come with me.  It started with my realization that you are my home.  It has followed us across states and time zones, through new jobs, and new houses, and new challenges, and new adventures, and it has led us here.

Home.

Because you are there.

I like you.